THE STORY – At the close of World War II, a young nurse tends to a badly burned plane crash victim. His past is shown in flashbacks, revealing an involvement in a fateful love affair.
THE CAST – Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Willem Dafoe, Kristin Scott Thomas, Naveen Andrews, Colin Firth, Julian Wadham & Jürgen Prochnow
THE TEAM – Anthony Minghella (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 162 Minutes
For better or worse, Anthony Minghella’s “The English Patient” perfectly encapsulates the state of Hollywood circa 1996. This should come as no surprise, given that it won the coveted Best Picture Oscar, but the Academy has been known to get it wrong before and, indeed, may have even gotten it wrong here. Is “The English Patient” a better film than fellow nominees “Fargo” or “Secrets & Lies”? That’s up for debate, but what isn’t up for debate is that “The English Patient” is one of the definitive films of the ‘90s, one of those films that caught the cultural zeitgeist in such a way that it felt like you had seen it even if you hadn’t. Seemingly everyone got swept up in the passion of the desert-set romance and the wartime nurse caring for her mysterious burned-beyond-recognition patient – everyone, that is, until “Seinfeld,” the biggest sitcom on TV, aired an entire episode about Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Elaine Benes getting shunned for finding it boring, 11 days before it won nine Oscars. That’s the kind of publicity money can’t buy, and the debate over the film’s quality has raged ever since. At once a throwback to the epic filmmaking of David Lean and an almost metamodernist version of the same, “The English Patient” is a period romance both sincere and detached. This combination doesn’t fully work, even as everyone involved is doing some spectacular work in bringing a lopsided script to life.
Hana (Juliette Binoche), a nurse in the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps stationed in Italy in October 1944, has a burn victim (Ralph Fiennes) in her care who cannot remember his name. After she receives word that her boyfriend has been killed and watches her best friend get blown up by a landmine right in front of her, she declares herself a curse to all her loved ones and gets permission to care for her mysterious, dying patient at a bombed-out monastery during her unit’s relocation. Nurse and patient are soon joined by Lieutenant Kip (Naveen Andrews), a Sikh soldier in the British Indian Army charged with disarming landmines left behind by the Germans, and David Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), a Canadian Intelligence Corps operative captured and tortured by Germans now on a mission to find the last of the people who led to his capture. He believes that Hana’s patient is that man, and as Hana and Kip fall in love, the burned man tells Caravaggio his story: He may speak with an English accent, but he’s a Hungarian count and cartographer named László Almásy. In the late 1930s, while on a Royal Geographical Society expedition to survey and excavate caves in the Sahara, he fell in love and began an affair with the married Katharine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas) right under the nose of her aviator husband George (Colin Firth). When George inevitably finds out, Almásy finds himself on a collision course with fate, as his loyalty and love will be tested.
When it comes to mimicking the style of romantic Old Hollywood epics, Minghella and the team do just about everything right. Gabriel Yared’s soaring score, John Seale’s gold-tinged cinematography, Ann Roth’s elegant costumes, Stuart Craig’s stately art direction, the striking sound design, and Walter Murch’s classical editing all won Oscars, and all have undeniable strengths. When these craft elements come together, as in the film’s climactic sequence, it results in a swoony rush of cinematic romance that makes it easy to understand why everyone fell in love with it. Aesthetically, the film gets everything right, so much so that it almost tricks you into thinking it belongs in the same rarefied air as classics like “Doctor Zhivago” and “Gone With the Wind.”
Unfortunately, the characters and performances are too bland to reach those lofty heights. Fiennes and Scott Thomas have chemistry together, but outside of this, there’s little inner fire to their performances, all gorgeous movie star surface with nothing underneath. Scott Thomas has some sharp moments while Katharine realizes she’s falling for Almásy, but the screenplay barely develops their relationship outside of physical attraction. She’s also not tasked with trying to emote through some horrific burn makeup, which Fiennes struggles mightily against for half of his scenes. The film’s extremely British aversion to sex saps the relationship between Binoche and Andrews of any excitement, rendering the one non-white character little more than an object of obscured desire. For her part, Binoche (who won an Oscar for her performance) vacillates between Hana’s joy and despair with expert precision, but her line deliveries can be stiff, muting the emotional impact of Hana’s journey, even as her silent tears in the climactic scene between nurse and patient communicate more than words ever could.
Despite these shortcomings in the performances, Walter Murch’s editing keeps things moving at a good pace for a three-hour-plus film. “The English Patient” was the first winner of the Best Film Editing Oscar to be edited digitally, but Murch seamlessly duplicates the feeling of an Old Hollywood epic, showcasing the possibility of the still-young technology. Lovely long dissolves between the two timelines are special standouts, fading in and out of images in a dream-like fashion, in keeping with the dreamy romantic quality of the film as a whole. Central to that quality is the film’s dialogue, which has an almost poetic quality at points, and its big themes of identity and self-preservation during wartime. It’s here that the film’s literary source material makes itself most known, and also where Minghella has most clearly bit off more than he can chew.
His screenplay does more work on the big thematic ideas than on developing either of the two central romances, relying on the visuals (Fiennes carrying Scott Thomas’s lifeless body through the desert, her white dress wrapping around them in the wind, is one of the most swoon-worthy romantic moments in cinema) and the actors’ charisma to carry them. While you can communicate a lot without having characters speak in a novel, it’s much more difficult to do so on film, and without a strong enough reason to believe in and care about either of these couples, that part of the film feels somewhat tedious and half-baked. Unfortunately, the big themes end up getting short shrift as well, coming together in the last act so quickly that you might miss it. It’s unfortunate because “The English Patient” has a stateliness to it that genuinely feels classical in the best way. In the 1950s and ‘60s, films like this would win Oscars because they showcased the best of cinematic craftsmanship while genuinely engaging both head and heart. “The English Patient” attempts to recreate that but misses enough details at the script level that it falls short of its lofty aspirations, but it gets enough right that it’s a worthy piece of cinematic history, even if it ends up being far more middlebrow than it was ever intended to be.
